Nature versus Duct Tape

Last spring I had a lovely family of birds move into the exhaust pipe for the fan in my bathroom. No, they weren’t in my bathroom – the pipe opens to the outside of the house directly above my bathroom window. When my Aunt had the house re-stuccoed (my word, not Webster’s), the guys apparently removed the covering that had kept nature out of that pipe in previous years. Unfortunately when they finished their job, no one re-covered the pipe and the birds thought it was a magnificent place to nest. For about a week after that I would hear various fluttering and chirping whenever I was in my bathroom – they were happily dragging all sorts of sticks, grasses, and lint into their new little abode. This wasn’t too disruptive….until the family grew. Suddenly I would hear several baby birds crying constantly to be fed. At first it was nice to have nature so close and it was very nice to hear the sounds of spring whenever I was in my bathroom. That lasted about two days for me…..then it was annoying. I suppose it would be like having a newborn in my apartment always crying for attention, except this was at least four or five newborns and they weren’t mine. So it was more like being in a grocery store and watching someone else’s kid throw a temper tantrum while the Mom is happily looking through the peaches and ignoring her child……you REALLY want the Mom to do SOMETHING to make the noise stop!

I am not mean enough to have gone in and swept the nest out of the pipe….I just waited until the baby birds were grown and the family vacated the premises. So a couple months later my Dad was nice enough to cover the pipe opening with some wire mesh and secured it nicely with a metal band. IT looked great to me…no more birds fluttering and chirping while I am trying to go about my business. So I thought everything was good…

Then I heard the fluttering start up again about a week ago. I figured there was no way the birds were back in the pipe….it’s covered now! I’d look at the opening periodically and the mesh was still in place, so I guess the birds just kept coming back to check out their old home….who knows. Last weekend I heard more of an intense fluttering and chirping going on by the pipe and went to have a closer look. The birds were pulling at the wire mesh to try to get back in! And they were actually making headway!

Apparently instinct is pretty damn strong and these birds wanted their old nesting area back. They had made a small hole in the mesh at this point, so I figured I had to do something to keep them out. I chose the man’s quick solution – I got out my enormous roll of duct tape that my Dad had bought me at Home Depot (seriously it’s about 100 feet of duct tape). I snipped off a couple pieces of that to cover the hole in the wire mesh and went on my way. I might as well have just hung a welcome sign out for the birds. I could have provided them with a whole ball of lint from the dryer! Alas, the duct tape did not work……here is the newly remodeled nesting area:

 

In this first picture you can see the pipe above my bathroom window...

 In this second picture you have a wonderful close-up of the hole the birds made and the nest they have built.

So much for the duct tape.....

Nature 1, duct tape 0

Engineering Geniuses....where's your dunce hat?

We have rain! Yay! SoCal doesn't get rain very often, so it's nice for a change in the weather. I am all for the ground getting saturated with lots of moisture, HOWEVER, we have a slight problem with it in our Cardiac Rehab building.

Basically the building needs to be razed to the ground and rebuilt. The patch jobs that have been done over the last couple ....decades or so haven't really fixed anything. We have leaks and gaps all over the place. After last year's rains (which weren't really that much), we had "repairs" done to prevent the leaking into the exercise room. Major problems that were "fixed" included building a drain along one wall so the water didn't seep under the wall and diverting the water down a little hill. The problem with this "repair" is that the drain empties out by our back door which is at the bottom of the handicapped ramp where we already had a problem of water accumulating and then coming under our back door into the exercise room! The engineering folks were told of this previously.....like years ago....and apparently their solution was to create this lovely diversion to bring more water to the area. (Wonderful job boys - when you get some free time I'd love for you to come over and hear my thank you speech) HA!

Our exercise room has a hard linoleum flooring which encourages water to spread out very quickly. The rain started this afternoon and within twenty minutes, there was already water coming into the exercise room (nice job engineering guys.....did you or did you not need a degree of some kind for your job?). My coworker and I called engineering to see if someone could come and provide a temporary fix for our long-term problem. A very nice, common sense kind of guy came over and checked out the issue. He agreed with my assessment of the situation - namely that some dumbass had decided the drain should divert the water to an already existing flood problem area and also noticed that the dumbasses had failed to put up rain gutters on the roof, so that all the water from the roof was also falling into our little flood pit and then spreading under the door into our exercise room. EXCELLENT! Can we give the head engineer an award for this peach of a job?!

Needless to say, when I left work about an hour later, we had a small lake in our exercise room and no way to prevent it from getting worse. The guy who came out to assess the situation was kind enough to put down some big ropey things that are supposed to soak up water. He put four of them down inside the door and that helped for about 30 seconds. Thanks anyway, common sense engineering guy. We also had a leak erupt from the ceiling into the exercise room.....that started a nice puddle on the floor before I could get a trash can underneath it. (Yay....I think we're up to about 5 leaks now)

The rain has ceased for the moment but we're supposed to get more storms this week and I SERIOUSLY doubt we will have anything fixed. Hell, I'm not holding my breath that the engineering geniuses will come up with a solution in the next decade. Hopefully I will no longer be at that same building and won't have to deal with it. Stupidity abounds in the corporate workforce.....I was just lucky enough to deal with it today.

Annoyed...party of one!

Kid's Mass

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not a churchy person. I was raised Catholic but no longer practice except at Christmas when I go with my parents to appease my Mom (sorry Mom). So we went to mass on Christmas Eve the other night. As usual the church is pretty full even though we got there 30 minutes early, so we ended up sitting in the "family room" - one of two rooms enclosed on either side of the altar where parents can sit with small children. This way they don't disturb the entire congregation if their child starts screaming but they can still hear the service.

I think it was one of the most entertaining masses I have ever attended! We also discovered that it was the mass where the choir was made up entirely of kids.....under ten I would estimate. I would venture to guess that they had practiced once together.....maybe more and they just didn't pick up on the different cues. Needless to say, there was one kid who happened to get right in front of the microphone for each song and just sang his heart out. His enthusiasm was wonderful....the singing was not. But it was great to hear anyway.

The other entertainment was watching all the kids in the room. We had a boy next to us who was about two and his big sister who was four, they both kept vying for their Grandma's attention. There were two girls in front of us as well.....about 6 and 9 years old. They kept climbing on their Grandfather during the service, which was cute. Then throughout the service the 9 year old kept whispering to her Grandfather but she would cup his ear with her hand and get her mouth right in his ear to whisper. It was so funny.

Of course we also had the variety of crying, screaming, whining, and temper tantrums going on. It made it challenging to listen to the mass, which was fine with me. My attention span isn't long enough to pay attention to mass the whole time anyway, so it was much more fun to watch the kids. There was one girl about three years old who had fallen asleep in her Grandfather's arms. It's always amazing to me what kids can sleep through.....she never stirred through all the off key singing, screaming, and crying.....she was completely gone! The only way I can sleep that deeply is if I take a sleeping pill.

Aside from the shenanigans of the kids, the only other part of the mass I found intriguing was that they had a guy dressed as Santa Claus come up to the front of the church at the end of the mass. Apparently he came in to get a blessing on his travels for the night.....cute idea for the kids. Surprising that the church would bring in Santa Claus but a nice touch for the kid's mass. It was great to be around all the kids and be entertained by their antics....good reminder of the innocence of youth on Christmas Eve!

I Matter

Every year our program (Cardiac Rehab) has a Holiday party for our patients so that they can get together to socialize. Not that they don't already do this on a regular basis when they are exercising (or supposed to be exercising), but apparently it's been a tradition to give them another chance to socialize with each other. This year I took charge of locating a venue and putting everything together. I loved it!! Anyone who knows me, knows that I love organizing social gatherings (I'm working on being less introverted, let me know if I'm succeeding....HA!).

The day of the party, everything went great and many of the patients let us know that they had a great time, the food was good, the games were fun, and the company was great! It was a great feeling to know that my first attempt at organizing this shindig worked out so well. The icing on the cake though was when one of our heart transplant patients (the one mentioned in a previous blog) stood up at the end of the luncheon and gave the staff a little speech of heartfelt thanks. She is an excellent speaker and with tears in her eyes, she proceeded to let us know how much we mean to her and the other patients. How much we help them in their struggle to improve their health, not only physically but also guiding them through their emotional upheavals and bringing a smile to their faces with our quirky personalities. You really play the role of psychologist when you work in Cardiac Rehab and there are many days when you are not sure if you've reached the person you're trying to help or not. It was wonderful to hear the gratitude in her voice and see the sincerity in her eyes...to know that our work is actually making a difference and that we DO matter!!

Replacing After Dinner Mints

I don't know about you, but when I was a kid and we took family vacations, I always LOVED checking out the bathroom in the hotel rooms! They always had cool stuff in there....I mean where else do you find a coffeemaker in a bathroom?! Or an iron and ironing board? To a six year old kid, that was really cool!

I haven't encountered anything in a bathroom in several years that took me back to that childhood memory until last night. I had dinner at a sushi place in the UTC area (Sushi Edo)...they had a very interesting AND USEFUL addition to their bathroom!! How many times have you finished dinner and wished you had a piece of gum or some kind of mint to counteract the aftereffects of your meal?

Here is your answer!! You may have seen this in your dentists office but this is the first time I've seen it in a restaurant!! It's a mouthwash dispenser!! There is a cylinder with mini cups on the side and you just push the lever to dispense the mouthwash into your cup. Genius, right?! WHY aren't all restaurants doing this?? Granted this was in a single person restroom versus one with eight stalls in it, but still...I think it's a fabulous idea! Don't you??

Now if only they had a floss dispenser....

Family

I was back in Kansas City, Missouri the first weekend in October (I know, this took me awhile to get out) - went there for a Wheeler family reunion. I haven't been there for six years...the last time was for my cousin Kristin's wedding. Since then she has had two kids! So I got to meet my second cousins, Maddie and Will, who are adorable!! (More pics to come) I also got to see my aunts (see pic to the left) from left to right, Judy, Marilyn, and Bev standing behind my Dad. He's the baby of the family and hasn't been back in several years himself.

It was wonderful to be able to catch up with everyone! My Aunt Marilyn doesn't look any different than she did six years ago when I saw her....great genes there! Bev and Judy look very similar as well. Judy still has her sarcastic sense of humor - it runs in the family.
For example, check out the welcome mat in her house:
















One of the highlights of my trip was going to a Farmstead with Kristin and her kids to pick out pumpkins! We had a great time playing various games, going on a hayride, and climbing hay bales.




The last full day I was there, we all went to a portrait studio to take pictures. My cousins and I had a picture taken together which we weren't all that crazy about so we took another one at Judy's house. We look like sisters! Well, Mehgan (left) and Kristin (right) are sisters....I'm just the cousin.Hopefully my next trip to see my family in Missouri will not be another six years!! I love you!!

Dating SNL Style

I feel like my dating life has become a Saturday Night Live skit. I went out with a guy from Match.com almost six weeks ago and the first date wasn't all that great. He's originally from Serbia and although we were able to carry on a conversation, it was somewhat awkward. His English is fine but he had a tendency to mumble a lot, so half the conversation was me asking him to repeat himself. The other quirk I noticed was that he would giggle after asking me a question....a nervous kind of giggle. It was somewhat annoying but I figured he was just nervous because it was a first date.

We went out again because I figured the second date might go better - maybe he wouldn't be as nervous. Maybe he wouldn't do the annoying giggle....maybe I would find myself attracted to him (I wasn't noticing that on the first date). He wanted to see a movie, so that's what we did for our second date. Not a good choice as far as I was concerned but whatever. He was 15 minutes late for the date (even though he picked which theater to go to) and the first thing he did was ask how my day was and then that nervous giggle came out! Yuck! We didn't talk during the movie and I was feeling uncomfortable.....I found myself angling away from him in the theater seat and holding my hands together and away from him so he wouldn't attempt to hold my hand.

After the movie he walked me to my truck (it was late, so we had no plans to do anything else). He asked me about going out again...followed by the nervous giggle. (Eeeww) I told him I didn't think there was any chemistry between us and he turned and walked away! I thought that was kind of funny but didn't think anything more of it. I didn't want to be too vague and give him the idea that I was interested.....I definitely was not.

Soooo......this past weekend (about six weeks after this movie date) he emailed me on the dating site! He wanted to know how I was doing and if I'd like to get together again. HUH?? Maybe he forgot who I was? Selective memory?? So, being the straightforward person I am, I emailed him back and reminded him that the last time we had gone out I told him there was no chemistry between us so why would we go out again....?? His response was: "I think you are attractive, I feel there is a connection. Can I call you?"

Seriously?? I thought I was pretty blunt in saying there was no chemistry. Apparently he thinks that he can sway me because HE felt there was a connection! HA! I appreciate persistence but that was just too much! My response: "I am not interested in getting together again and I do not feel a connection with you. Do not contact me."

Do you think maybe that will work?! Sheesh! Can I get a ruling on this? Crazy? Stalker? Language barrier??